Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Happy Canada Day and welcome to History Carnival 147!I’m excited to host this month and help
showcase some of June’s best history blog posts.

This month we have a number of fantastic posts that
highlight the sheer breadth of freely available, intelligent, and accessible
historical blogging.

These first two posts were some of the most
thought-provoking entries I read this month.In Seeing
And Challenging Your Assumptions (Isn’t Easy), Joanne Bailey reflects on
her own historical practice and the challenges in confronting underlying
assumptions and reframing evidence.Matt
Houlbrook, inspired by Bailey’s post, picks up on this theme of self-reflection
and self-critique in his On
Being A One Trick Historian.“Habits,” he writes, “shape and constrain how we work as historians.”And, while useful, can “get in the way of
thinking imaginatively, creatively, and differently about the past.”

Each
of the previous posts discusses somewhat the struggle scholars have with
sources and how we approach or use them.Switching gears a bit, these next posts highlight historical practice in
an increasingly digital world.Sarah J.
Young looks at sources, historical memory, and the effect of digitization in Historical Memory of the Gulag.At The Suffrage Postcard Project,
Kristin Allukian and Ana Stevenson use digital humanities approaches to “understand
how feminist digital humanities practices engender new historical narratives of
parenthood – motherhood and fatherhood, broadly defined – in
early-twentieth-century suffrage postcards.”Alana Farrell’s guest post at the Medical Heritage Library, The
Censors of the Royal College of Physicians, calls attention to the recent
digitization and uploading of several 19th century medical works.

Last, I couldn’t host the History Carnival at Panacea
without some early modern medical history!Hugh
Aldersey-Williams’ A Bestiary of Sir Thomas Browne
is a fascinating post on Browne’s natural philosophy work and his correction of
various “vulgar errors” such as belief in the existence of unicorns and
basilisks.At the Sloane Letters Blog,
Matthew DeCloedt relates an interesting story about Sir Hans Sloane, slander,
and libel in Bad Blood and Indecent Expressions.In a fun post at the Recipes Project, Annie Gray and Alun Withey
recreate historical recipes in the Curative Power of
Beer and Rhubarb.While Sara
Read and Jennifer Evans close Early Modern Medicine for the summer with a post
on Inconvenient Incontinence in
post-partum women.

Hope you’ve enjoyed a quick journey through June’s history blog
posts!As always, if
you’d like to be involved in the monthly History Carnival you can email or DM
the admin at the addresses found here.

Tuesday, 19 May 2015

The bridge of your nose tingles and your eyes start to
water, after a quick intake of breath through your mouth, you can feel the
pressure building in your sinuses until your body is wracked with a quick,
explosive movement, expelling air, mucus, and irritants.

Those of us with seasonal allergies are perhaps a bit too
familiar with that feeling right now!

Sneezing happens when our mucus membranes are irritated by allergens,
disease, or other triggers and is an attempt to forcefully expel the irritant.

What Is A Sneeze Anyway?

For some early modern medical practitioners, a sneeze was a
bit more complicated.As Robert Bayfield
wrote, a sneeze was an “involuntary expulsion (by the nostrils) of the
flatulent windie spirits, and sharp vapours offending the brain.”[1]Indeed, as another author noted, sneezing was
very useful to cure “obstructions of the substance of the brain.”[2]

Sneezing, it was believed, helped to remove superfluous
humours from the brain.[3]

Photo via CDC/ Brian Judd (Photo Credit: James Gathany, 2009)

Jean Baptiste van Helmont questioned this assumed connection
between the brain and sneezing.[4]Comparing the “waterish snivel” and “snotty
snivel” that exited his proboscis, van Helmont noted that both occurred when he
inhaled powdered hellebore and tobacco.Since both occurred quickly after nasal irritation, they were “speedily
made” without any “hurting of the brain” and thus not some sort of “brain excrement.”[5]

Aside from expelling excessive brain humours, John Pechey
noted, that sneezing could also be a symptom of disease or of “sharp Vapours…transmitted
to the Nostrils.”[6]

The sneeze was so commonplace - even in times of health –
that Pechey wrote it “scarce deserves the Name of a Symptom.”Yet, he continued, why would we say “God
bless you” when someone sneezes if it were not sometimes dangerous?[7]

Indeed, the origin of the wishing well the sneezer was a
matter of some debate. Some argued that
the practice began with Prometheus.Others argued that the practice was popularized in the sixth century
during the time of Pope
Gregory “when at Rome in a great sicknesse,
men died with sneezing” during a time of epidemic
disease (likely the Plague
of Justinian.[8]

The humble sneeze, then, deserved a bit of respect!

Sneezing and Prognostication

For the superstitious, sneezing could be used to prognosticate whether an
ill person would live or die:

Also take a handfull Rew, and stamp it with oyle of Roses, and lay it upon
his head, being shaven before, if he sneeze once
he shall live, if he sneeze not he shall dye: this
is proved by Galen.[9]

Sneezing and Sex

A truly surprising number of midwifery texts mention
sneezing.Pechey’s The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged, for example, argues that
a violent sneeze could break a hymen (and so a lack of hymen did not equal a
lack of virginity).[10]

Violent sneezes were said to cause female genital and rectal
prolapse and even to “loosen the Ligaments of the Womb, and so cause
miscarriage.”[11]

Despite these potentially serious complications, medical
practitioners thought that sneezing could also be remarkably beneficial to
pregnant women during labour.Indeed,
Robert Johnson thought that it was “a good sign of deliverance” if a labouring
woman naturally began sneezing.[12]

Philip Barrough wrote that inducing sneezing was
particularly helpful to “strong” women who laboured for several days with a
large child or even multiple children.[13]

The sheer violence of sneezing was thought to speed up the
delivery process and many practitioners listed methods of inducing sneezing
fits in their labouring patients.

Pechey, for example, recommended the following powder to
induce sneezing in pregnant women:

Take of white Hellebore, half a
dram, of long Pepper, one Scruple, of Castor five grains. Make a Powder: Let
the quantity of a Pease be blown up the Nostrils.[14]

Inducing Sneezing

Sneezing powders with a variety of
ingredients were ground into very fine powders and then blown up the nostrils
with a hollow quill.

Hannah Woolley recommended this one:

Take Cloves, Ginger, and Calamint, of each a like quantity,
boyl them in White-Wine, and therewith wash the Nose within; then put in the
powder of Piritrum to provoke one to sneeze.[15]

White hellebore. Photo credit: wiki user Planchon.

Paul Barbette, a French surgeon, used the following sneezing
powder on John N., a fellow surgeon, who was suffering from the plague:

Take the flower of Lillies of the Valley, Leaves of
Marjoram, of each half a scruple; white Hellebore, three grains: Make them into
fine Powder.

As Barbette recorded, the powder encouraged his patient to
sneeze “3 or 4 times” before dying.[16]

White hellebore, or sneezewort, was
used frequently to induce therapeutic sneezing.Nicholas Culpeper’s translation of the Royal College
pharmacopeia lists grated white hellebore as a harsh medicine that induced
sneezing, killed rodents when consumed, and could be used to treat melancholy.[17]

Sooo…suffering from seasonal allergies right now?Just think, all that sneezing is actually
making you healthier and happier ;)

Tuesday, 31 March 2015

And don't throw the past away/
You might need it some other rainy day.

'Cause everything old is new again.

Or so go
the lyrics to Peter Allen’s “Everything Old is New Again.”

Cow Bile & Onions for the Eye

Recent findings by
an interdisciplinary team of scientists and Dr. Christina Lee, a scholar of
health in Anglo-Saxon England, suggests that Allen’s lyrics may apply to
medicine as well.

Bald’s Leech-book,
aka the British Library’s MS Royal 12 D (see also Harley
MS 55, ff 1r-3r), has been a matter of scholarly interest for some
time.Compiled in the mid-10th
century, possibly in Winchester,
the manuscript contains a variety of medical receipts and a description of how
to surgically fix a harelip or cleft lip.[1]

Lee translated an
eye-salve receipt which was then recreated and tested by a team of
microbiologists.As several newsarticles
revealed, the simple salve of garlic and leeks/onion, wine, and cow bile proved
extraordinarily efficacious against MRSA or methicillin-resistant
staphylococcus aureus.

The BBC article
on the discovery concluded that “it seems Anglo-Saxon physicians may
actually have practised something pretty close to the modern scientific method,
with its emphasis on observation and experimentation.”

Those who have read my work, sat in my classrooms, or know
me can guess how I reacted to that rather condescending statement.[2]

Anyway.

Let’s take a look at some other nonsensical sounding
treatments that are still sort of used today, shall we?

Treating Diarrhea With
More Poop

John Hester’s The Pearle of Practise includes a number
of very odd and very noisome sounding treatments.The book sometimes reads like a compendium of
horrifying and odd things like treating gout with the wax dripping off a
roasted puppy that has been stuffed with black snails and rubbed with saffron.[3]Or prognosticating whether or not someone
would die of the plague by laying a frog on their belly.[4]

Or the case of an empericke
practitioner who cured cancer with “centumpedes” found in English pigs.These creepy bugs were mashed in ale and
consumed causing “a certaine black bugge, or worme to come forth [from the
cancerous body] which had many legs, and was quicke and after that the cancker
would heale quicklie, with any conuenient medicine.”[5]

Or curing shingles
with a plaster of barley, vinegar, and doves dung.[6]I could probably go on for a while.Like I said, a veritable compendium of odd
things.

One of the
treatments that caught my eye, however, simply stated that in cases of the flux
or diarrhea, “diuerse Souldiars in the warres haue beene cured thereof,
by setting their fundament in warme Horse dung.”[7]

Fecal microbiota transplants or FMT is exactly what it
sounds like: the insertion of foreign fecal matter into a patient – through
enemas, pills etc. – to treat C.
difficile (stomach pains & diarrhea), colitis, and irritable bowel syndrome
to name a few.

Trepanation inevitably comes up when I’m asked about
terrible early modern surgical procedures. It involves drilling a hole into the
skull so deeply that the membrane surrounding the brain is exposed.

We have archeological and textual evidence of prehistoric
and premodern trepanned skulls from Asia to the Americas.Surprisingly, trepanation wasn’t necessarily
a death sentence either – many patients survived and their skulls show signs of
healing.[8]

But why would anyone need a hole in their head?Trepanation was sometimes used to treat
seizures, skull fractures, migraines, and madness.The hole was thought to release pressure

Along with amputation, trepanning was one of the most
visibly violent and extreme operations a surgeon could perform.

Early modern surgical texts mentioned trepanation frequently
and even included illustrated how-to sections for more inexperienced surgeons.

The German surgeon, Johannes Scultetus, for example,
included a very detailed series of numbered images of a skull being trepanned
with additional text.[9]Both early 18th century writers,
Charles Le Clerc and Belloste also included figures with their description of
trepanation.Le Clerc’s image depicts
the many layers of bandages he deemed vital to dressing – and thus curing
successfully – a trepanned skull.[10]Belloste also depicted an innovative thin
lead plate he used to improve the trepan process by decreased risk of sepsis.[11]

Trepanation underwent something
ofa revival in the mid-20th
century.Bizarrely, self-trepanationists
such as Bart Hughes
advocated the procedure to increase blood flow to the brain and reach a higher
state of consciousness.[12]

Today, however, modern surgeons rarely recommend trepanation
except in cases of subdural hematoma.Generally caused by head trauma, blood collects below the dura and
increases pressure on the brain – trepanation just releases the pressure, the
blood is suctioned out, and the skull piece is (usually) replaced promptly.

There are a few more: maggots are now used to debride wounds, leeches are used in reconstructive surgery, and the medieval practice of variolation directly led to development of the smallpox vaccine.

Who knows what the past has in store for us?

Let me know what you think here or on Twitter - I'm @medhistorian.

[1]For more on the manuscript see: M. L. Cameron
(1983). Bald's Leechbook: its sources and their use in its compilation.
Anglo-Saxon England,
12, pp 153-182.

[2] It wasn’t pretty and involved some ranting with words
like epistemology, humility, and incommensurability thrown around.On a more positive note, however, it did
inspire this blog post.

[3]Hester, John.
The pearle of practise, or Practisers pearle, for phisicke and
chirurgerie. Found out by I. H. (a spagericke or distiller) amongst the
learned obseruations and prooued practises of many expert men in both
faculties. Since his death it is garnished and brought into some methode by a
welwiller of his.London: Printed by Richard Field, dwelling in
the Black-friers, (1594), 20.